Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Whether you read The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Statesman or The Catholic Herald, you’re bound to stumble upon a hefty smattering of religious affairs journalism.

Whatever your belief, or lack of belief, chances are you enjoy keeping up to date with religious affairs. It may be to keep abreast of events within your own faith, or perhaps to just follow the farcical antics of other religions.

Regardless of your pre-existing viewpoint, you won’t have too much of a problem finding a piece of journalism that is conveniently tailored to your way of thinking. Indeed many recent news articles regarding the ordination of women bishops, catholic child abuse or legislation for gay marriage were spun to fit a particular point of view by the simple selection of the appropriate vernacular.

For those entrepreneurial journalists wishing to cover all bases and therefore maximize their reach, this could require rewriting each piece to tailor the language for each demographic.

In order to solve this problem I have customised the AutoCorrect feature in Microsoft Word to enable generic religious news stories to be either liberalised or conservatised to suit the target audience. The AutoCorrect function simply searches for predefined strings within the text and automatically replaces the string with the designated replacement string.

In order to liberalise your religious article, pull down the Tools menu in MS Word and select AutoCorrect. Then simply set up the function as shown in the screenshot below:

Thursday, 12 July 2012

I have attached an A4 poster and an A5 flyer for the Winchester Science Festival on 20th, 21st and 22nd July . It would be most appreciated if you could print a couple out and stick them on the notice board in your office, library, classroom, laboratory, observatory, staff room or space ship.

Tuesday, 3 July 2012

Dave Hughes and I have been successfully running Winchester Skeptics in the Pub for 2 and half years now. We’ve tended to book speakers that reflect our personal interests and have predominately ended up with science based talks from the likes of Simon Singh, Chris Lintott, Adam Rutherford and Lewis Dartnell. Indeed this pro science agenda seems to have resonated well with the good folks of Hampshire and as a result we’ve outgrown our original pub and moved to a bigger venue at the Winchester Discovery Centre. Not technically a pub I know, but they do have bar.

Last Christmas James Thomas kindly offered to organise our Christmas event and came up with “Skeptics in the Planetarium” featuring Shelia Kanani, Helen Arney, Helen Keen and Robin Ince. It all turned out rather well. In fact it turned out so well that James embarked on an even more ambitious project and has pioneered the inaugural Winchester Science Festival.

Although all the details of the talks are all up on the Winchester Science Festival website, I just wanted to list the main talks here and provide some simple links to enable you to buy some tickets.

So here’s is the amazing main line up for the first ever Winchester Science Festival:

Friday 20th July 2012

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10:00

Simon Watt:

Dissections Uncut

On Channel 4's 'Inside Nature s Giants',
scientists went under the skin of some massive animals to figure out what
made them tick. Join presenter Simon Watt as we look at some of the
fascinating science that didn’t make the final cut.

Dr Karen L Masters from the University of
Portsmouth will present a thrilling account of the ongoing discoveries that
regular citizens are making within the Galaxy Zoo project. This is real
science carried out by everyday people who have a love of astronomy.

Helen Clarkson from University College
London leads us down the murky path of forensic Human Identification. This
talk will act as an introduction to the basic techniques used by forensic
scientists to identify human remains in Human Rights violations, mass
disasters and gang crime scenarios. It will outline the job of a forensic
anthropologist and how they tackle difficulties in the field, but also how
the role varies depending on the scenario.

Saturn is known for being Lord of the Rings
but what about its plethora of incredible moons? Saturn has over 60 moons,
each amazing in its own right but if you were to take a family portrait you
would be forgiven to thinking they were not related to Saturn at all as they
vary in size, shape, composition and colour. Join Sheila as she takes a
flying tour through Saturn's mini 'solar system', visiting moons such as 'the
one spewing out water', 'the one that looks like the Death Star', the one
that is bigger than Mercury' and 'the one that really does have a 'dark
side'.

Professor Jon Butterworth, member of the
High Energy Physics group on the Atlas experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, demonstrates some of the underlying
concepts and gives the latest news from the experiment - whatever it is by
then!

Professor Jim Al-Khalili will consider some
of the most famous paradoxes in science. Is Schrödinger s cat dead or alive?
Why does it get dark at night, and where are all the aliens? He will explain
how these enigmas can be resolved with a little thought, and demonstrate how
each can tell us a profound truth about how our Universe works.

It's a voyage of exploration like no other
– to Titan, Saturn's largest moon and thought to resemble our own early
Earth. For a small team of British scientists this would be the culmination
of a lifetime's endeavour - the flight alone, some 2 billion miles, would
take a full seven years. This is
the story of the space probe

TimandraHarkness and Matt Parker:Nature:Fail Engineering and Maths to
the Rescue

Nature is a mean mother, limiting us with
darkness, gravity and hay-fever. But we have
engineering for the win! Also: robots. A comedy from the creators of the
sold-out success "Your Days Are Numbered: the maths of death".

Fresh from recording the second series of
'It IS Rocket Science!' for BBC Radio 4, Helen brings her paen
to the glories of science fiction to Winchester Science Festival. Revel in
the enduring power of science fiction to bring us hope of a newer, better and
fairer world! And er..temping?

Saturday 21st July 2012

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09:00

Peter Harrison:

The Science of Lucid Dreaming

Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?
Would you like to learn how? In this fascinating and brilliantly funny
lecture, the audience will learn what lucid dreaming really is (since there
is much confusion among the general public), the scientists and research that
have got us to where we are today in our understanding of the phenomena, and
unique insights about how our brains work that we’ve only gleaned through
this research.

'Astrobiology' encompasses research into
the origins and limits of life on our own planet and where else this
marvellous phenomenon might have emerged. On some worlds the conditions could
be stable enough to allow life to progress beyond microbes. These alien
plants and animals would be subject to the same physical constraints as life
on Earth, and so certain features might be universal throughout the galaxy,
whereas other alien features would have evolved as ingenious solutions for survival
in environments very different to Earth. So what might an alien actually look
like? Building on firm scientific foundations, where evolutionary biology,
astrophysics and planetary science overlap, we ll see just how plausible are
the aliens that populate our sci-fi films and TV shows.

So you've found a healthy, fertile mate,
you've fought off your rivals and you've convinced them that you are what
they were looking for. Sorted! But the reproductive race is far from over, my
friend. We have entered the realms of Sperm Warfare. Join evolutionary
biologist Simon Watt (Inside Nature's Giants) to learn about the devious tricks
used by cells, organs and bodies to win the race to fertilisation.

No-one s ever seen dark
matter, not even a single particle. So why do
astronomers insist that it s all around us? Is it just a figment of their
imagination? And how come particle physicists are so excited by it when they
don t even know what they re looking for?
Cosmologist Andrew Pontzen (BBC Stargazing Live) and LHC physicist Tom
Whyntie introduce this mysterious stuff and its wider implications for
science.

Britain has a proud history of scientific
research, an activity that fuels the economy and spurs on the development and
innovation that keeps it healthy. In these times of austerity, scientists are
coming increasingly active as grassroots campaigners to help persuade the
government to keep up its commitment to science. Science Is Vital, formed in
2010, successfully campaigned for the settlement that saw a cash freeze for
research funding, using social media to mobilize over 35,000 supporters in
just over a month. With the next Comprehensive Spending review on the
horizon, scientists are gearing up to make their voices heard once again.

Viruses are pathogens germs that afflict
all forms of life. All they want is to reproduce but in doing so they cause
diseases that vary enormously in severity. How do they work and what can be
done to stop them? My research focuses on one small family of viruses that
includes foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), a germ that is well known in
Britain because of the devastating outbreak in 2001. Though too small to see,
even with a powerful microscope, my research used X-rays to reveal viruses in
fantastic detail. My talk will describe how zapping viruses with X-rays helps
us to understand the workings of FMDV and to figure out how we might tackle
the disease that it causes.

Science never stops. Unlike a business
report, research doesn't come to a finite ending and no result is ever
complete. From the popular mythology of "Eureka!" moments to the
media reporting that science has 'solved' things - do you really know how
scientists work day to day?

The Earth s population has reached 7
billion. By the middle of this century it will hit 8 billion. This will drive
a perfect storm of rising food and energy costs, biodiversity loss, increased
migration and conflict. All under the influence of global climate change. How
will you and rest of humanity not only survive but
prosper? Today s undergraduates did not cause these problems. It was previous
generations who over-consumed and over-polluted. But it is current and future
generations that will have to fix these problems. In that respect our
University has something of a moral responsibility to give students the
skills and knowledge that will put them in a better situation to respond to
these challenges, and who knows, maybe even solve them. A truly inspiring
talk about a new initiative by the University of Southampton.

What is the most abundant element in the
human body? There are 92 naturally occurring elements but how many of them
are necessary to humans? In this talk we will look at how some of the
elements are used in the human body and what the effects of too much or too
little could be.

Stuart will discuss current and future
missions using small satellites, with an emphasis on activities at SSTL and
the space-science missions that are now becoming possible as small satellites
become increasingly sophisticated.

The LOFAR radio telescope is currently the
largest radio telescope network in the world. And the westernmost station of
this vast array is located in Hampshire, a mere 10 miles from Winchester.
Please join Dr Scaife for a fascinating journey into deepest space and
deepest Hampshire as she discusses the truly amazing facilities we have on
our very doorstep.

Planet Earth is a pretty boring place to
be. Thanks to our atmosphere, the temperature stays relatively constant and
harmful radiation doesn t reach us on the ground. Get out in space and things
get much more interesting. From wild temperature changes in our own solar
system, to distant galaxies that are spitting out vast amounts of gamma-rays, via the glow left over from the Big Bang and
the largest telescopes ever built, in this talk Jen will take you on a tour
of the Extreme Universe!

Dr John Copley is a lecturer in marine
ecology. His research explores the biology of the deep ocean and he is a
veteran of expeditions to undersea volcanic vents and other extreme
environments in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. This talk
will look at some of the surprises from recent expeditions and where marine
research is leading in the future.

Tiny elephants once lived on islands all
over the world. They evolved again and again, on many different islands, and
at many different times. But what exactly is a dwarf elephant? Just how small
were they? Why did they evolve to be so small? Where did they evolve? When
did they evolve? And why do we even care? Join the Natural History Museums
Dr. Victoria Herridge for an interactive, family-friendly lecture, to
discover the latest research into all these questions.

Unmissable. Science vs Magic is a live
science show that combines stunning demonstrations of both magic and science,
but ultimately aims to convince even the most avid Harry Potter fans that
science can beat magic hands down when it comes to delivering excitement and
wonder. As part of the show, Alom performs some of the most amazing illusions
used by magicians, involving transformation, teleportation and mind-reading,
and reveal how they can all be done for real using Science. The show also
examines the parallels between magic and science which may explain why so
many scientists are fascinated by magic and why, ultimately, science is a
much more rewarding activity. In terms of curriculum content, the show is
really about how science works and also features a lot of material relating
to particles and the behaviour of light.

Robin will be bringing his new show, fresh
from the BHA Voltaire Lecture and it is so fresh and new that we don't really
know what it's about but I have been assured that it will contain many
references to esteemed scientists Richard Feynman, Charles Darwin and Deepak
Chopra (One of these is a lie).

In addition to the main talks listed above there is also a full Youth Programme of events.

I suspect that it's all going to be rather good. So I hope to see you there.